Not like, literally making your own dye.  That shit would take forever, I think.

But I bought this fugly little BT Crump saddle, right?  I hate all colors "warm" and the orange in this was making my eyes rot.  The saddle was worn, I only spent a couple hundred on it, and I didn't think it would be a huge loss if I ruined it.

TL;DR:  I probably ruined it.

I diligently read the tutorials by Amanda, Carly, and Nicole, bought my supplies, went outside the norms for saddle leather colors, and gathered my adult beverages.

I mean, if I'm going to potentially make an ugly saddle uglier, why not have some fun with it?

Hindsight, I sort of wish that I'd done the entire saddle in blue.  But I opted to do the panels in blue and the rest in a conservative chocolate.

I followed the protocols in the real tutorials, deglazer, dye, dye, dye, dye, finisher.  I was a little meh about buffing or wiping or whatever.  The chocolate was super easy and friendly, mostly because I think I was covering brown with another shade of brown.  Unfortunately, I drunkenly spilled half the bottle on my garage floor, much to the delight of my husband.  So while I can successfully say that suede will happily soak up the dye, my knee patches still look like shit because I didn't have enough to go around.

I feel like it's lightened a little bit.

The blue was a bigger issue.  I had to do just shy of a quarter million coats and once I let it dry for a while, the finisher wiped some of the color off.  I'm sure buffing at this point would have helped, but instead I just did another blue coat and let it sit for a few days while I forgot about it.  #timemangement

Orange before.

Orange after deglazer and starting the blue.

One layer of blue and splotchy af.  Also, note the giant pool of chocolate dye in the right corner.

2+ layers of blue and calling this shit done.

When it came time to finally use the saddle, I didn't trust my stellar DIY skills and plopped it down on a navy pad while wearing crappy breeches.  My friends told me that it was fine, it only looked like I shat myself afterwards.  Since riding in it exclusively, I've got a nice little matte crotch rub near the pommel and equally exciting rubs from the blue panel.  Part of me almost wishes I cared.